Our U.S.government is the entity being run by a junior varsity.

Back in June, I warned that ISIS would take its time in the approach to Baghdad.  (See here as well.)  ISIS wasn’t going to mount the sort of military attack on Baghdad that we saw on Mosul earlier this year.  What we could expect to see was a consolidation of ISIS’s hold on the Euphrates corridor through Anbar Province (map below), from the Syrian border to Baghdad, followed eventually, at a time ISIS considered propitious, by a ramp-up of terrorist-style bombing attacks inside Baghdad.

We should be watching for those bombing attacks to begin, I predicted in June.  And now they have – at the same time ISIS has made advances along the Euphrates corridor that materially threaten the Iraqi national forces’ hold on their remaining positions there.  The Iraqis are extremely worried that they can’t hold those positions unless the U.S. brings in ground troops.

(Image via Tea Party Tribune)

The fathomless disconnect that is the Obama “policy” on ISIS in Iraq and Syria can be conveyed – if not fully explained – by three disparate but related data points.

One is that we keep getting our briefs on U.S. activities in Iraq and Syria from the State Department.  With weapons of war being used by U.S. forces, purportedly for systematic purposes, we nevertheless hear about the use of those weapons from a couple of mid-level civilian staffers at Foggy Bottom (Marie Harf and Jen Psaki) with no military background or expertise.

I don’t know why no one in the mainstream media seems to find that odd.  It was only a few years ago that Americans were fully conditioned to something much more logical: the many decades of having military activity explained to us by military commanders and military spokesmen.  When our armed forces were engaged somewhere, we expected to hear about objectives, strategy, and operations from the Pentagon.

It’s an understatement to say that Harf and Psaki lack credibility on national security matters.  How can we possibly take the Obama administration’s policy seriously?

[…]

Refusing to have a positive, assertive intention actually paralyzes you at the outset, making it hard to identify events for what they are, much less categorize and prioritize them.

The modern West has so deconstructed its moral confidence that its leaders see the intrinsic human act of having intentions as a form of unacceptable aggression.  ISIS hasn’t hamstrung itself in this manner.  That’s why ISIS is winning today, while Americans and other Westerners, with all our theoretical advantages, can’t even figure out what’s happening.

Read more at J.E.Dyer’s LibertyUnyielding.com